Police still sorting out child porn

Posted: Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Winder police detectives still are sorting through hundreds of pornographic photos and videos from a local man's travel trailer to find out how many of the images contain minors and if any of those children are from Winder.

Samuel Laird, 54, of 23 Windsor Drive, was arrested Saturday and charged with sexual exploitation of a child after a routine traffic stop uncovered eight pornographic pictures containing minors in the center console of his white Chevrolet Astro work van.

Detectives searched a travel trailer behind his home that night and found hundreds of similar photos.

Laird is being held at the Barrow County Detention Center.

Winder police officers worked from midnight to about 8:30 a.m. Saturday searching Laird's home and the trailer, which he kept off-limits from wife and two children, said Capt. Dennis Dorsey, public information officer for the Winder Police Department.

In the trailer, officers found hundreds of pornographic photos on disks and seized a computer and multiple external hard drives. Many of the photos contained pre-adolescent minors and are believed to have been downloaded from the Internet.

"We discovered a large amount of very disturbing pornographic material when we began searching the property," Detective Rachel Love said in a statement released by the Winder Police Department on Saturday.

The investigation is the largest child porn bust in Winder in at least a decade and has left officers shaken and disturbed, Dorsey said.

"This is something that we don't see a lot," he said. "And as far as just dealing with something like this, it's disturbing. Most of our police officers have small children, so this is tough. Stuff like this gets to you, because it's not something you see every day."

Police haven't recognized any of the children in the photos that they've gone through so far, Dorsey said.

"We haven't found any victims, in this point of the investigation, that we recognize as being from Winder, but the detectives are still going through the material," he said. "A lot of seems to be cut-and-pasted together."

Authorities believe that Laird edited some of the photos himself but don't have evidence that Laird was distributing the child porn to others, Dorsey said.

The police officer who originally stopped Laird's van, spotted him driving erratically about midnight Saturday on May Street in Winder. He was turning in and out of parking lots and seemed to be trying to put distance between himself and the patrol car, so the police officer ran his tag. He found that the tag on Laird's van was registered to a different car and that the van was uninsured.

When he pulled over Laird to arrest him for the tag and insurance violations, the officer spotted a glass pipe commonly used to smoke methamphetamine on the passenger seat.

While Laird was booked into the Barrow County Detention Center, officers took an inventory of the items in the van and found the pornography.

Authorities only have charged Laird with crimes stemming from the traffic stop - driving a car without a proper tag, driving without insurance, possession of drug related objects and sexual exploitation of a child. However, detectives expect to file more charges once they are finished taking an inventory of what was found in the trailer, Dorsey said.